I know that this may be a long shot but I have a group of students who are doing a project on the “Night Witches” for National History Day. Is there anyway that they can contact you to ask about your grandma? They are in awe of the courage of these women.

I was ‘forced’ to read about the “Great War” by a friend’s father since I had a love of WWII but not much knowledge of the Soviet side of the struggle. It is amazing that Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt were so engaged in the process and yet once the war was over, the Soviet Union’s activity, sacrifice, and participation were omitted from Western history of WWII due to the ideological differences. They defeated Nazi Germany. They were in Berlin way before the other allies. They bore the brunt of the atrocities committed by that Nazis (because they were slavs and communists, two of the many focal points of Nazi hatred). Yet they liberated Stalingrad and pushed the entire German army back into Europe and into the fatherland in a fashion unseen in long history. Their ferocity in recompense was due to the Nazi scorched earth policy going into and hence retreating from Soviet Russia. While much can be said about atrocities on both sides, millions of russian soldiers perished at internment and concentration camps and millions of civilians perished in cleansing processes. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend, even if just for the time needed to vanquish your enemy.

Soviet women soldiers and aircrew proved that women could fight every bit as well as the men, and usually much better. It’s a pity for feminism that the Soviet Union passed so quickly from being perceived as wartime ally to cold war enemy. I think that this led, in the west, to forgetting just what women are capable of doing.

The initial reluctance, in the Soviet Union, to deploy women also (surely) marked a forgetfulness. Very capable women soldiers (known, at the time, as the Amazons) fought on the red side in the revolution and civil war. It is thought that Arthur Ransome, in his Swallows and Amazons books, took the name of the Amazons from these redoubtable women. Ransome spent a lot of time in revolutionary Russia and, indeed, married Trotsky’s secretary. Generations of girls must have found inspiration in the fierceness of Nancy Blackett. One of the wellsprings for that inspiration lay in revolutionary Russian women. Another wellspring lay in Taqui Altounyan… who may qualify as another unsung hero… but she takes us a long way from the Night Witches.